User:DNA/Major Assignment 5

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Music downloading is less than ten years old. Starting with the well known Napster, music, the content, is shared across the media of the internet and is not just about stealing music. This new technology has created a change in our culture by the media of the internet. Music downloading has brought the cultural focus on the virtual world of the internet, making the internet impossible to live without, and deteriorating the physical world as we know it.

Itunes is a cultural text with a name that almost any person will recognize. It is a software program and online digital media store that sells music, video and films, television shows, and more. Six years ago Itunes was a brand new and strange technology and now it has become the major form of legally buying digital media on the Internet.

Itunes was formed in response to a need after Napster, the first technology website for exchanging music files across the internet. While many people had already had access to the internet, Napster’s technology brought millions more people to the internet. At its start it had twenty- two million users and was growing everyday while AOL only had nine million subscribers after twelve years (Stephen). This number rose even more with a sharp increase when Napster was brought to court because it brought awareness to the great new form of internet use. As people were “swapping songs at the current rate of 1,400 per minute” it greatly surpassed the number of those buying the normal music form of CD’s (Stephen).In the very beginning of the Music downloading phenomenon statistics where showing that “record sales in the world's top 10 markets declined 6.8% in 2002, first-quarter album were down 10%, and Roughly 1.7 billion blank CDs were sold in 2002, up 40%.” (Gundersen) This shows that more people were getting music online and burning them to a CD then actually buying the CD itself. It shows the beginnings of the focus on the internet as a way of life. Now people were able to get what the wanted in the virtual world, instead of having to go out into actual stores of the real world to find what was needed.

Indeed, many authors predicted that with the popularity of the Internet music downloading “the aisles of music retailers will be empty. Not just empty, they will be gone.”(Fox) Fixmer states that “The media sizzle with the prophecies of the imminent demise of our capitalist way of life.” It is also thought that the “collapse or serious shrinkage is inevitable [of giant music labels] if the perilous disconnect between corporations and customers persists” (Gundersen) In other words, music entertainment giants need to put their business online in order to continue in the entertainment industry. Even though there are still retail music stores, the beginnings of these ideas have been seen with the loss of profits of these retail music stores.

Apple’s Itunes was a program created as a beginning solution to music piracy. Itunes, however, has become not a solution but a global phenomenon. iTunes sold more than 1 million digital songs in its first week.(Gundersen) It now has over a million users that buy online millions of songs a day. “At Apple, it's fast, smooth, no typos, excellent quality.”(Gundersen)

The Success of Apple’s Itunes led it to lead the way in the digital revolution that has been created. Their first Idea was the Apple Ipod. The Ipod is the first digital music player. The Ipod brought ease to portable music listening that portable CD player’s never could. All a person’s music could now be in one place, with nothing but the small player to carry around. As popularity of the Ipod flourished, more people became attached to online music downloading, as the most popular way of getting digital music for the Ipod was to buy it online at the Itune music store. ”The Success of Apple’s Ipod, which plays downloaded music, demonstrates how the world of traditional retailing is colliding with digital technology.”(Fox)

This idea can also be seen if we compare the Ipod to the radio. The radio only has speakers. This lets any person in the area able to hear what one person is listening to on the radio. Radio listening automatically connects people with the outside world as the radio’s music, coming out of the radio speakers, affects everyone in the vicinity connecting them to each other in the culture. This happened especially in the 1980’s when people would walk around with boom boxes loudly playing music for everyone to hear.

An Ipod however, has earphones. Earphones cut the music listener off from others. If a person is listening to music with earphones it is difficult to interact with that person as they cannot hear anything around them. They cut themselves off from the outside world only focusing on the digital world of the Ipod music. Apple continued to create a new culture as not only did it allow digital music downloading but movie downloading. In 2005, Itunes content included full length movies and television episodes.

Now, it is possible to get anything online because of the technology that spurned from music downloading. This technology has not just made the internet more fun and useful. It has made people attached to the internet in life, spending more time in the digital world than in an actual retail store. This idea is also supported by the fact that artist are now selling music directly for online downloads, like Radiohead and Danger mouse’s ‘the Grey Album’, making it impossible to go to a store. Even books are becoming more popular online. Stephen King “released a novella on the Internet, selling hundreds of thousands of copies at a few bucks a pop”(Rothenberg) As books are the oldest form of information and entertainment, bringing books to the virtual world will bring every form of tangible entertainment to the virtual world.

The function of this new technology is seen by the downloading of different forms of media, especially music, movies and television, and the culture becoming so attached to this virtual world that the internet has become mobile. The first idea of this was in cell phones. Cell phone service providers allowed a small form of the internet on cell phones so customers could use their cell phones to directly connect and download music and movies to the cell phone almost instantaneously. Higher end model cell phones, like PDA phones have a full internet service with a web browser directly on the phone.

The newest technology that will be the future is Apple’s Iphone and Ipod Touch. The first is a phone with an Ipod built in and the second is the newest version of the Ipod. Both of these new products have the internet built in, and with a touch of a button connect you to the Itunes website for fast access to download music, movies, television shows, audio books, cell phone ring tones, podcasts, etc. Also, with the touch of one button, a person can be connected to the popular website You Tube. This website shows various types of videos of things that people have uploaded to the website. Not only is a person listening on headphones, but because it is on a personalized screen it allows only for cultural interaction only over the internet and has no connection to the physical world that we live in.

These examples especially show that the society’s new focus on the Internet is not just because of the growth of the internet. The Internet has grown because of the ideas that a person is now able to find anything on the Internet, and this was only possible by the sharing and downloading technology created by the need to share music. The focus on the internet has grown since the creation as downloading as well, as the culture has quickly developed great leaps in technological products to fill the need to be able to get music, movies, television and more no matter where we are. The music downloading technology has left the world we live in behind as we are focused not on physical products like CD’s but on the digital version of music. No longer so people need music store and soon maybe not even book stores. If the focus of this culture stays in the virtual world many companies will soon gout of business as there is no need to have publisher or music labels when it is possible to send products directly to the consumer. The culture has changed and all because of the technology that created music sharing and downloading. “Technology is not just something we use. It changes the rules. It can even change the game” (Gundersen) and it most definitely already has.